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Click here for the Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Unofficial Information pages, featuring facts and
tricks for Dragon NaturallySpeaking that you will find no where else.
I used to work for Dragon Systems where I was the architect and lead
engineer for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the world's first large
vocabulary, general purpose, continuous speech dictation system.
Dragon Systems was sold to its arch rival, Lernout & Hauspie, in the
summer of 2000. In late 2000, Lernout & Hauspie entered Chapter 11
bankruptcy under a cloud of possible fraud and creative accounting
(before it was fashionable to do so). Soon after that, L&H was
liquidated, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking was sold to ScanSoft, Inc. of Peabody, MA.
Although I would like to think that my leaving lead to the downfall of
L&H, I suspect that it was the other way around.
As of January 9th, I resigned from Lernout & Hauspie. Although some believe that my resignation was a direct result of my current project being cancelled; this event had very little to do with my decision. Instead, I have decided that Lernout & Hauspie does not have a future, or at least a future that I want to be a part of.
As of March 26th, 2001, I have started working at Ab Initio Software Corporation, in Lexington, MA. You can visit Ab Initio's web site at http://www.abinitio.com/. Other than what the web site says, I cannot provide more details about the company. Suffice it to say that Ab Initio has nothing to do with speech recognition, natural language or accessibility software. If you need to contact me at work, you can send email to jgould@abinitio.com.
You can contact Joel at
joelg@alum.mit.edu.
Technical Notes
The previous version of the Gould Home web site was designed using frames.
By using frames, Daphne (and I) could quickly add additional pages and
pictures without disturbing the navigation bars at the top and left.
However, we have decided to redesign the site to avoid frames and to add
thumbnail pages for all our images. To preserve the ease of adding
additional pages, I designed a simple HTML creation system for this web site.
The body of each page is hand-coded html, one file per page. Then, a
special Python program is used to automatically create the navigation bars
on the top and left. The navigation bar on the left changes depending on
what directory you are in, so the Python program figures out what entries
to include based on the other files in the directory.
The thumbnail pages and thumbnail images are completely created from a
second Python program which creates thumbnails for every jpg file in a
given directory.
To make the system easy to use, I added a Windows 98 shell extension to
folders and source files. All Daphne has to do is right-click on a
file or directory and select "Web Process" to create all the appropiate html.
If you are interested in learning more about Python, you can visit the Python Language Website. I am also making
the source code of my Python programs available for inspection. The code also
requires a template file which is not included.
This web page (http://www.gouldhome.com/joel/index.html) was last updated on November 10, 2002.
For any comments or suggestions about the site contact Daphne Gould.
Contents copyright © 1999-2003 by Joel and Daphne Gould.
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